NEW BEGINNINGS: What a difference a year makes . . . Róisín Ingleis looking forward to her first Christmas with her twin daughters
WHILE BABY-PROOFINGthe Christmas tree the other day, wondering whether the lower-hung branches might viably double as pine-scented teething rings, I was hit in the stomach by that most familiar of yuletide feelings. At first I thought it was indigestion (we cracked open the piccalilli relish a bit early this year) but then the feeling unfolded, warm, fuzzy and more intense than any other turkey season past: Gratitude.
It has been hard work, the hardest job I’ve ever done, but I have so many reasons to be grateful since giving birth to twin girls eight months ago. Somewhere close to the top of this list is the fact that I can now say I have something physical in common with Angelina Jolie. Ange and I have both participated in an activity that should by rights qualify as an Olympic sport. More exciting than golf, only slightly less glamorous than beach volleyball, we are both masters in the discipline known as tandem breastfeeding.
Those are two words I would never have put together before the birth of Joya and Priya last April. And even though, at this stage, I like to think I am something of a pro, it still seems an extraordinary biological not to mention logistical feat.
Tandem breastfeeding! It truly deserves that exclamation mark. Jolie, according to a reliable source, liked to use my own preferred position, the “football hold”. This is where the babies’ heads are at the breast while their bodies extend down your side, supported by pillows. I will never forget the first time I latched them both on without the aid of either my boyfriend or a makeshift crane fashioned from bicycle parts and kitchen appliances. It happened the first day he went back to work. It wasn’t a good day.
Me: “Can’t you get another week off? How am I going to keep them alive for a whole day on my own?” Him: “I have to go now, let go of my leg. And the other one.”
My first attempt at unaccompanied tandem breastfeeding wasn’t pretty. It never is, if truth be told, except maybe when you are Angelina. My younger sister has the photographs, which she says also double as excellent blackmail material, to prove this. But when I managed to manoeuvre their wriggling bodies and ravenous mouths into position that day, I felt like there were no limits to what I could achieve. I might even put some lipstick on today, I thought. Literally anything seemed possible.
For the first six months I knew the privilege of having two beautiful babies cradled in the crooks of my arms, sucking rhythmically as though their lives might just depend on it. I knew the pleasure of seeing those deep, dark blue eyes framed with black lashes so long you could sweep the floor with them, gazing intently into mine. So no, it wasn’t pretty, but it was the perfect position from which to fall in love.
I WAS NEVERgoing to be a martyr to the breastfeeding cause and with twins I knew I would have the perfect excuse to avoid becoming the human equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet. At the first sign of a cracked nipple, I planned on hitting the bottle hard, thank you very much.
But before deciding if breast was best for me, I had to get through the birth. The night before my scheduled Caesarean section, at the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street in Dublin, I hardly slept with worry, about, oh, you know, the whole being cut open thing.
I cried like a baby when the epidural was administered, like two babies, which was appropriate under the circumstances. But the anaesthetist was almost unbearably kind and I was well acquainted with the consultant wielding the scalpel, and the whole painless thing was over in a matter of so many surreal minutes, leaving me with the neatest scar I’ve ever seen.
“Here’s the first one now,” someone said, and then a bright-eyed baby was held in front of my face, my tiniest, oldest girl, Joya, who fixed me with a knowing stare, and an expression that said “much to teach you I have”, which made me think momentarily about switching a couple of letters and naming her Yoda. Priya was delivered a minute later, another rabbit from the procreational hat, slightly bigger, much sleepier, but just as beautiful as her sister.
Later, lying in the recovery room, wallowing in the post-op, morphine-induced fug, waiting to meet my girls properly, I heard the nurse saying that some private rooms in the Merrion Wing had just come free. She was wondering whether there were any semi-private mothers in the recovery room who might like one. I didn’t know what the Merrion Wing was but it sounded like my kind of place, so I nearly split my exceptionally neat scar trying to get her attention. And that’s how I ended up being wheeled into my own room with an en-suite bathroom and a television. But, and it was a big but, there was only one cot beside my bed, which meant there was only one baby, Priya, to enjoy the five-star luxury with me.
JOYA WASfour pounds when she was born, positively a bruiser compared to some of the premature babies in the neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) where she was taken directly after the birth. When she arrived, she was found to have a breathing apnea, which meant she was in the habit of turning blue and not breathing for several seconds. (The word apnea comes from the Greek meaning "without wind", a lack of which she has made up for since in a variety of potent and noisy ways.)
In denial, and out of my head on morphine, I convinced myself they must be exaggerating about the turning-blue part. Until, that is, I hauled myself up to the NICU to visit her for the first time. Beside this mini-baby, an alarm beeped manically, and I watched as her face did indeed turn an unholy shade of greyish blue.
She spent 10 days there being looked after by the people my friend calls “the best babysitters in Dublin”. One of them, Fleurie, won my eternal gratitude by replying “yes, of course” when I asked to take this baby, who seemed to weigh exactly nothing, out of the incubator to feed her. The tubes, alarms, metal and glass all melted away as we locked eyes for the second time. It was a precious moment in an avalanche of precious moments, which included the morning, 10 days later, when we brought our healthy baby home to a house decorated with balloons by the neighbours. Welcome home baby girl, the banner read.
BEFORE JOYA WASallowed home, we were sent away from the hospital with Priya, because unfortunately my health insurance didn't cover us to stay in the Merrion Wing until her 18th birthday. Five intense days followed while we tried to settle Priya into her new surroundings, returning to Holles Street a few times each day to feed and be with Joya. Priya had patiently taught me how to breastfeed and she was such a good teacher there wasn't a cracked nipple in sight.
Even so, we badly needed help. My own mother had fallen down a hole the day the girls were born, which prevented her from moving in with us for three weeks, as we had planned. She arrived to see me in the hospital in a wheelchair (I thought this was a morphine-induced hallucination), with two busted-up ankles, and was confined to her apartment for the next month.
So in those early days, we needed somebody to stay at home with Priya while we went to see Joya, who, having remembered how to breathe properly, had been moved from the incubator to a cot. A new parent, beset by that insides-on-the-outside feeling, wanting to do the best for both girls but not blessed with the gift of bilocation, I rang my boyfriend’s mother, Queenie (doyenne of bleach products, bulk buyer of kitchen roll), in tears one day and, like an angel, if angels come dressed from head-to-toe in cut-price clobber from TK Maxx, she answered the call.
Her mercy dash proved to be both a good and a bad thing. Good: Even though she was terrified of being left in charge of such a small baby, she was there for us when we needed her most.
Bad: Hmmmm. How do I put this without being banned from entering the Portadown homestead forever? Let’s just say that, like many a mother-in-law figure before her, Queenie didn’t agree with a certain aspect of my Keeping The Baby Alive Plan.
To put it in context, Mary of the Merrion Wing, a saint among women, baby whisperer extraordinaire, had told us to feed our premature baby Priya every three hours, whether she was awake or asleep. We clung to this information like drowning people to a life raft. We didn't have a clue what we were doing but we knew we had to feed the baby every three hours. If we did that then we wouldn't sink and everything would be alright.
THE FIRST TIMEI woke Priya up to feed her, I didn't mind when Queenie suggested it was wrong and perhaps even a little bit evil to wake a sleeping baby. She had raised six children, she had experience, and waking sleeping babies was up there with hanging them out the window by their ankles in the list of things not to do.
“I’d never wake a sleeping baby,” she said, as I blew gently on Priya’s face.
With a new serenity bestowed on me by motherhood, I explained to Queenie that we’d been told to do this by the hospital. I thought that would be the end of it, but instead I had to listen to the “never wake a sleeping baby” mantra every time I went to wake the sleeping baby, who pretty much slept constantly those first couple of weeks.
“I’ve never heard,” she offered on day three as though it was the first and not the 117th time she had broached the subject, “of waking a sleeping baby.” At this point, Serene Mother went out the window to be quickly replaced by Sleep-Deprived Crazy Mother.
“Please,” I bleated, gritting my teeth. “Please don’t ever say that to me again. I am only doing it because the hospital told me to. I know you wouldn’t wake a sleeping baby. But I have to. Please stop saying it.”
She said exactly nothing and I read her silence to mean I had finally broken through. This was a mistake. At lunch later that day, Queenie and I ordered a lemon-meringue pie. I was taking a bite when I noticed it was time for the baby’s feed. My boyfriend, Queenie’s beloved second son, went to wake her and that’s when I heard the words “I would never wake a sleeping . . . ” She didn’t get to finish. I cracked. My outburst – oh, hello there, you must be Psycho Mother, I wondered when you’d surface – sounded something like: “TOLDyounottosaythatanymore, areyouTRYINGtoBREAKmewoman, whyyyywhyyyareyoubeingsoCRUELamonlydoingwhattheHOSPITALsaid, whyyywhyyyyareyouDOINGthis tomeee???”
You’d need to add a few high-pitched shrieks to get the full picture.
I’d never seen Queenie, a consistently animated, vibrant, talkative woman, become so still. When she spoke it was in a tight voice, with wounded words about getting the train home, and having only raised six children, and knowing where she wasn’t wanted, and never visiting or helping out again. I am grateful that this dreadful episode, a week after the girls were born, turned out to be the most challenging moment of the past eight months. Part of me still thinks cracked nipples would have been preferable to seeing that strained look on my mother-in-law-in-waiting’s face that day.
I APOLOGISED. She accepted my apology. She didn't get the train home. The sleeping-baby mantra was never uttered again. She sent word later through her son that a friend of hers told her that premature babies need to be fed every three hours, which meant she accepted that I wasn't making it up. We are closer now because of Lemon Meringuegate. In fact, I am only able to sit writing this because Queenie is wheeling her two granddaughters around town, lapping up the twin-related comments from the general public, and I hope she knows how grateful I am.
I seem to be bursting with gratitude these days. For the patience of my own mother, who when her ankles healed, came to change nappies and keep me company and sat for two days decoding Gina Ford and Alice Beer's A Contented House With Twins. Thanks to my mother and Gina and Alice, I am in a routine for the first time since secondary school. I know that at 7pm they will be snoring and I will be free to climb into my bed with a good book and give thanks.
I am grateful for that bed. We bought a massive one from Ikea and shared it with the girls over four blissful months. I am grateful for a book about the Montessori method from birth to aged three which inspired us to think outside the cot. Instead of behind bars, the babies sleep on double mattresses on the floor of their room and while both our mothers worry about what will happen when when they progress from scooting to crawling, they are kind enough not to say it too often.
I am grateful for the thoughtfulness of friends and family. For the sister who brought meals and desserts in the early weeks when cooking dinner or even – and I never thought I’d say this – eating was the furthest thing from my mind. For the other sister who said “whatever you do will be the right thing”, which gave me strength to trust my own instincts through that first fever, those first teeth and the first time I was convinced one of them had swallowed my earring. Thankful, too, for the friend who gifted us with two slings and introduced us to the joys of babywearing.
Gratitude. For the kindness of strangers, the ones who smile and say “you’ve got your hands full”, a phrase I hear on average five times a day. It never gets old. For the woman on the packed Dart who knew a stressed first-time mother when she saw one, found a seat so I could breastfeed one screaming baby, kept an eye on the other sleeping baby, told me not to worry, and then disappeared before I could thank her properly.
And I am grateful for my boyfriend, for sharing, really sharing, the load and for giving me the girls. Ah, those girls. Because of them I can go whole minutes, sometimes several of them in a row, without thinking about myself, my problems or my insecurities. And after a lifetime spent reading self-help books, with all those endless tips about how to live fully in the moment, I’ve discovered, as most new parents do, that in this intense new environment, it’s pretty much impossible to live anywhere else. For that – Christmas, New Year, Ramadan, Hanukkah – I hope I will always be grateful.
Róisín Ingle is on leave until March
